Details
Hello,
I have been using phabricator for awhile but I can't understand what's the different and use of the shortname and callsign in Diffusion repositories. I tend to use exactly the same value for both but upcase the callsign.
What's the reason to have these two things since they seem to fit the same purpose?
Answers
You can read about the difference here:
https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/diffusion_managing/#basics-callsigns
In short, "callsigns" were introduced to distinguish commits among SVN repositories, as SVN uses a sequential numbers 1..N to refer its commits (or more precisely "revisions").
For example, If you set a callsign B to one of your SVN repository, you can now refer the 100th revision of the repository by rB100.
Short names seem to be mostly for URLs. My guess is that they were introduced to generate more human-friendly URLs (say, source/bravetoaster.git rather than source/B.git). So they are generally longer and more recognizable than callsigns.